Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe ed. by Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson (review)

Literary scholars have often been challenged in the past fifty years to reorient themselves in their chosen fields of study by many assaults on their pedagogical and critical principles. Typical assaults have featured charges upon the validity of literary history and biographical criticism. Nor has the rise of sociology with its systematization of material facts proved a firm defender of the liberal arts. Claims proposing revolutionary epistemic and paradigmatic shifts have depreciated the intellectual coin of the Enlightenment and aggravated the “culture wars.” The growth of the “administrative university” may have effected a major decline in the humanities, one result being that one fifth of undergraduate degrees awarded today in North America are in business studies, another that the place in the curriculum of pre-1800 texts is increasingly hard to locate. What better author, given his voluminous writings in and across many genres, could one select through whom to respond creatively to the issues outlined above?

The editors of this volume are to be congratulated for achieving several major tasks: they serve the Defoe Society’s future well by providing an overview of Defoe studies in the past half century; they offer summary guidelines of the volume’s fourteen essays; they identify biographical and bibliographical issues to which Defoe and his corpus give rise, at the same time commenting on present-day curricular and pedagogical challenges to literary humanism. They prepare readers to confront a polemical author who since his own days has always provoked controversies. Given his multifarious nonfictional and fictional forms, Defoe merits interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches that are meted out here. The readership he addresses is diverse, as are his expressive styles. Overall, this volume debates empirical and positivistic issues even as it upholds a rhetorical tradition that values probability, imagination and aesthetics.

Geoffrey Sill’s opening essay on Colonel Jack isolates plot elements in this novel that signal its generic potentiality to be numbered with later sentimental texts that equate virtue with acts of benevolence. Ideas in this essay might be related to the Earl of Shaftesbury’s emphasis on self-discourse, a mode Defoe features in autobiographical narratives. John Richetti’s contribution reads Defoe “novelistically,” showing how his narrators dialogue with readers. Richetti’s emphasis on oscillating material and psychological states skilfully works against modern realistic expectations of novelistic development. Elizabeth Zold studies the abridgements of Robinson Crusoe produced for American children during World War II: textual excisions reduce the narrative to a survival guide that heightens material safety over anxious introspection. Zold exposes the conceptual problems arising from illustrations that depict Friday as the other and the enemy.

The second group of four essays treats rational and supernatural features of Defoe’s intellect. Focussing on Caledonia (1706), a propagandistic poem foretelling a bright future for Scotland, Maximillian Novak defends his career-long stance that Defoe was a rationalist after Descartes as well as an Enlightenment optimist. By contrast, Riccardo Capoferro probes Defoe’s apparition narratives for a potential synthesis of scientific and religious views that anticipates gothic modes: The Apparition of Mrs. Veal places natural and supernatural explanations of reality in dialectical tension to induce in readers via an epistemological oscillation an “ontological hesitation.” Capoferro finds scope in Defoe’s naturalizing of the supernatural to propose that he contributes to modern narrative devices of fantasy. Katherine Ellison writes as a media historian, finding in Defoe’s texts a concern with mediation not simply as flexible formalism but as textual codes. She examines his preoccupation in Serious Reflections with the obliqueness of angelic communication and spiritual converse. By positing inevitable gaps between transmission and communication, Defoe insists on the impossibility of constant interpretive readiness in readers. What is new here is the theoretical way in which Ellison reads Robinson Crusoe through the lens of Serious Reflections. Kit...